[loren s]

Well since we can all test H.264 now if ya bought the pro number. How is it ? Does it export fast ? Is the file size smaller? Is the quality good ? Or was it all hype ?

[bmedina]

Quality is decent, but not as good as Apple hyped it up to be. From bond at hydrogenaudio:

my findings:
- the mp4 file uses slightly a variable framerate
- every frame consists of 5 slices
- max 1 b-frame in a row is used
- b-frames are set adaptively
- there are no multiple reference frames used
- no cabac used
- no loop used
- no weigthed prediction used
- no frame reordering used
- buffering period seis used

featurewise this stream is a baseline profile stream + b-frames, pretty poor imho...

Cabac gets you a 10% bitrate reduction losslessly. In loop filtering is reallly what begins to set H.264 apart. But Apple uses neither of these.

And encoding takes forever. On my DP 867, encoding a one minute clip took over half an hour.

[loren s]

f,,, u,,, d,,, g,,, e,,,,

I hate hype

[Thinine]

You might want to try it yourself and see for sure.

[loren s]

would have to wait and buy it, but if it is not forth the cost then eh ..

[Thinine]

H.264 was the only reason you were going to buy Tiger? Especially now that QT7 is out for Panther. Anyway, check out Apple's HD Gallery. Looks pretty sweet, though you'll need a G5 to get good frame rates on the files.

[loren s]

no silly, h264 was the only reason I wanted to buy quicktime

[Thinine]

I also want to know how that guy made his analysis.

[hotani]

I downloaded it and watched one of the HD previews and my poor little dual 867 was completely maxxed out (that's about 180% CPU usage for you math majors), I'm guessing I was getting about 16-20fps but who knows.

Even viewing an mp4 it was a huge strain on the CPU - almost maxxed out (140%). Same file viewed in VLC used about 40%.

[removed oversize inline images. All inline images must be no wider than 480 pixels. --tooki]

[loren s]

WOW tested out Serenity HD. 100 megs! At 2 minutes.. What crap... I thought h 264 was suppost to give smaller file sizes or do some sort of scaleing trick.. This is no good at all. Sure the vid was super nice looking but thats 50 megs a minute,, that is a HUGE strain on a server. How is this good ?

[MaxPower2k3]

Nobody ever said you'd be able to stream HD in real time with H.264. that's a ridiculous thought at this point. the 1080 Serenity trailer is 129mb, which when you take out the audio stream is probably around 6 mbits. That's amazingly good for HD video. broadcast-quality MPEG2 HD is around 17-18 mbits.

DVD-quality SD MPEG2 is around 5-7 mbits, so you can fit just about as much H.264 HD onto a DVD as you could with SD video before.

[bmedina]

Yeah, it's not bad compared to MPEG2. But it's not great compared to other H.264 encoders.

The bitstream analysis was done on a PC. I'm not sure what tool he used, but it's not available for OS X.

[ambush]

Playing Apple's NASA H.264 video on my PB12 1.33/768 required me to renice the QuickTime Player process and quit all apps -- even the Finder -- to get a good frame rate at fullscreen. I think I was getting 30 FPS... I could not tell it was skipping.

Cool stuff. Mind blowing details.